Legacy

The Inferno: What’s Land Got To Do With Anything?

When KYT asked me to write Legacy content over Twitter I was shocked by the request, as this particular day was a very bad day. Work was horrible; I misplaced my wallet, and got a 300 dollar traffic ticket. However, like the Magic community has proven over and over again there are great moments and great times to make the play.

For those of you who have no idea who I am, my name is Richard Laurie, and like you I love Legacy and have for many years. It has always been my preferred format when it comes to playing Magic for quite a few reasons. The number one reason though is I have been playing Magic since revised and, as such, have a fairly large Magic collection at my disposal. Granted, I have played and still play Type 2 at times, nothing brings out my brewing more than diving into Magic’s historical realms. Let’s face the facts here; Legacy and Vintage (R.I.P.) are Magic’s great history. Giving player’s access to the very best cards in the game and facing off against each other on the battlefield. We are, in a sense, a very spoiled breed of player.

Perhaps it is also fair enough to say that Legacy, despite its popularity, is really the older Magic generation’s game; even though many people are getting into it, they are essentially “buying” into a format that people have played for a long time and take that for granted at times. How I view it and how anyone else may view it are two different things. I am only speaking from a perspective as both a collector and a long time player, but each of us is very different in our reasoning and I have no problem in saying I am wrong at times.

Over the past couple of years (since Lorwyn) I have played my hands at Standard and Extended with a small splash of playing limited. While I love the Game, I feel very limited playing those formats, especially the new Extended. So, I went back to my beloved Eternal format.

What does this have to do with Legacy? Pretty much nothing, but as I said, you don’t know me…but now you know a little bit more about me.

Let us move forward into the Game. Over the past couple of years I have tinkered with decks that I both loved and hated. The Goblin deck in particular falls into both categories. While I love the little Red beating machines, I can no longer stand playing them, or playing against them. Recently I have been playing around with deck ideas, brewing my own brews of classic decks modified to how I would see them play out, rather than running someone else’s list card for card and merely modifying them for my meta. I will research and analyze deck lists and then strip them to their bare bones and rebuild them. Sometimes this strategy has failed me and other times it has worked in my favour.

For example, back during the winter months I played the little red machines at a mox tournament – where the meta was 1 out of 3 players were playing Landstill, or 43 lands. In two different games my first turns were this. Mountain, [card]Goblin Lackey[/card], pass turn. On their turn, in almost every game between the two players, their first land drop was [card]Maze of Ith[/card]. (fuuuuuuuuuuuu rage) – This event proved one thing too me, I am a sore loser at times, but we all have our faults and this opened my mind up to something I have always hated- the necessity of playing land hate.

After the event I went home with my roommate, who did fairly well at the event with Dredge, since he was the only Dredge deck there. No one was prepared for him, but that isn’t the point. When I got home that evening I ripped apart the Goblin deck and laid it out in front of me. I looked at it and looked at the lands and then it hit me; I knew right then and there what my mistake was, not including [card]Wasteland[/card]s in my deck. At this point my anger was so instilled against Land decks, that I went into my collection and pulled out every card I had that destroyed and/or blew up lands. From this point forward I would sit down over the course of the next 3 weeks and build my Landhate deck. What I ended up building was what I called The Corporation because, let’s face facts, corporations screw you, and I wanted to fuck everybody.
In the original build I was running [card]Wasteland[/card], [card]Tectonic Edge[/card], and [card]Ghost Quarter[/card]. I really went all out on the land hate.

This is what the original build actually looked like.

[deck title=The Corporation]
[Creatures]
4 Progenitus
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Show and Tell
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Brainstorm
4 Life from the Loam
4 Exploration
4 Standstill
4 Crucible of Worlds
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Wasteland
4 Tectonic Edge
4 Ghost Quarter
4 Tropical Island
2 Forest
2 Island
4 Misty Rainforest
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
3 Manabond
3 Krosan Grip
3 Pithing Needle
4 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

What the deck turned into was something else entirely. After a few play tests with my local play group and decimating with the [card]Wasteland[/card] lock, thanks to Crucible, I realized that, overall, I needed a faster win condition. I didn’t want to be sitting in the breeze twiddling my thumbs-I wanted to destroy my opponents. I went back to the drawing board. At this point in time there was an SCG event that happened (I don’t recall which one exactly) with a deck tech about the Shelldock Doomsday package. I had seen this before and honestly thought to myself, “This might work.”

The following days took me someplace I wasn’t sure I would like, but was willing to try. I completely stripped the Green and decided to go straight up Blue/Black – Blue and Black have always been great together, so I didn’t see an overall problem with the colours and black gave me access to more land hate which of course was the original idea of the deck.

So out came the following cards:
4 [card]Tectonic Edge[/card]
2 [card]Ghost Quarter[/card]
2 [card]Forest[/card]
2 [card]Misty Rainforest[/card]
2 [card]Tropical Island[/card]
3 [card]Life from the Loam[/card]
4 [card]Exploration[/card]
2 [card]Crucible of Worlds[/card]
3 [card]Manabond[/card]

This gave me 25 slots with 3 of them being in the sideboard. The very first choice I made was fixing the land to tune it to black/blue and adding of course [card]Shelldock Isle[/card] and [card]Doomsday[/card]. Tec Edge, became [card]Underground Sea[/card]s, Misty and [card]Ghost Quarter[/card] became [card]Polluted Delta[/card] and [card]Tropical Island[/card] and Forests, became the [card]Shelldock Isle[/card]s. Now that I had the lands fixed I went and looked for the right spells. Obviously, the first choice was adding the [card]Doomsday[/card]s and taking out the [card]Life from the Loam[/card] and a [card]Crucible of Worlds[/card].

Now that I added what was necessary for the deck to function, I needed to figure out the remainder of the spells. I decided to go with a classic addition of [card]Sinkhole[/card], and [card]Dark Ritual[/card] for quick acceleration and destruction. I, personally, believed that it was a good to shoot for a possible first turn hole on the draw. When I moved Emrakul to the Maindeck and brought the [card]Crucible of Worlds[/card] out to the sideboard adding [card]Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre[/card], I couldn’t help but think that this was an overkill scenario. Now the deck has changed, once again, since the inclusion of New Phyrexia into the metagame. The overkill factor I felt with the secondary build was quashed. The tech added since NPH’s release has been subtle, [card]Standstill[/card] becomes [card]Ancestral Vision[/card]s, and [card]Daze[/card] is now [card]Mental Misstep[/card].

We can skip what version two looked like as its relevance was only particular to me. However, it played out to very aggressively in both the short and long game. Version 3 on the other hand has proven itself to be consistent since NPH

[deck title=The Corporation v3]
[Creatures]
4 Progenitus
2 Emrakul, The Aeons Torn
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Show and Tell
4 Doomsday
4 Force of Will
4 Mental Misstep
4 Brainstorm
4 Dark Ritual
4 Sinkhole
3 Ancestral Vision
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Wasteland
4 Underground Sea
2 Ghost Quarter
2 Tropical Island
4 Polluted Delta
4 Shelldock Isle
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Misty Rainforest
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
1 Crucible of Worlds
2 Sword of the Meek
2 Thopter Foundry
1 Life from the Loam
2 Krosan Grip
4 Trickbind
2 Thorn of Amethyst
1 Relic of Progenitus
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

After re-examining my meta I realized that my Sideboard now had some serious issues. No longer was retooling just an option, it needed to be re-built for not only an alternate strategy but also the ability to control the board more. At this point my Meta shifted to Combo and Burn. I no longer had all the answers I needed. As you may have noticed, my new sideboard contains [card]Trickbind[/card], there is a story behind this, but it also has a lot to do with [card]Mental Misstep[/card]. No longer is just [card]Stifle[/card]-ing a fetch land or annihilator just a one shot drop. The split second adds a nice counter-countermagic ability to it. I am proud to say this has worked wonders for me.
The bad match ups aren’t really what I expected them to be.

The Mirror, Show & Tell Decks, and NO Bant:
When I first built this deck, I proxied another deck alongside it to play against the mirror, I duplicated my list card for card, as I felt this was a possibility. I can honestly say the deck runs well against itself, but what does it matter when in the end the deck beats itself? What it really came down to in this Mirror-match was the play. The ability to explode first is very relevant. While, albeit, when I played the proxied deck myself, I aggressively mulliganed against my opponent. This gave me a considerable advantage in many ways. I knew for a fact that my opponent was A) playing my deck which I was very familiar with while he was not, and B) I knew the cards I was looking for in an opening hand.

We played a total of 16 games when I tested the mirror, 16 seems to be my magic number when I build decks, so I try to keep my testing against a single deck type to that number. Out of the 16 games, I lost 8 times. 50 percent of the matches went to my opponent. The reason being is that out of those matches, I kept sketchy hands to see how my opponent would play it out. This, of course, allowed me to discern the different variables I may face. Cards I specifically looked for on the draw were [card]Mental Misstep[/card], [card]Brainstorm[/card], [card]Dark Ritual[/card], [card]Sinkhole[/card] or [card]Doomsday[/card], and a few lands to get myself going. Cards I watched out for were exactly the same. Before I actually played against the deck, I played against the deck I don’t know how many times in my head. This wasn’t the best strategy either as I mentally defeated myself on more than a few occasions.

After testing the mirror, we moved on to playing two different decks, one was a sneak and tell deck and the other one was Drew Levin’s and AJ Sacher’s NOBant deck.

Sneak and Tell: This was by far the hardest of the match ups for me. I have played against the deck more times than I care to count at various events. However, I never play tested against it for deck building purposes. My opponent, on the other hand, was very familiar with his Deck as he himself plays it. Out of all the matches we played (16 again). Most of our matches actually ended with me conceding if I allowed a [card]Sneak Attack[/card] to resolve. I had nothing in my main deck to deal with a resolved Sneak if it hit. My best option a majority of the time was to pray I wasn’t getting hit with an Emmy. On the occasions where I didn’t let the Sneak hit, but allowed his [card]Show and Tell[/card] to go off, we almost consecutively dropped either Emmy or [card]Progenitus[/card] exclusively – it wasn’t until mid-way through our later games he had [card]Terastodon[/card] and [card]Woodfall Primus[/card] in his deck as previously he hadn’t drawn into them and I was unaware of them. Playing defensively became vital until I was able to resolve my own Doomsday/Shelldock or a [card]Show and Tell[/card] with a big drop on the board. I would give this match-up a 60/40 split in Sneak and Tell’s favor.

NO Bant: This deck can be quite the pain in the arse, while I lost to it a few times, it was one of the better match ups, a resolved [card]Natural Order[/card] is never a good thing, because you know they are dropping a beat stick with your name on it.
I learned very quickly that attacking my opponent’s landbase was vital for my survival. Even though the deck works at attacking the landbase anyway, there were many moments during play that I didn’t actually think about it as I was too busy playing out the results in my head rather than concentrating on the board presence. A fault of mine, learned from playing chess, that I have carried with me through the years.

The Good! Or how I learned to stomp on a person when they are down in order to win.

Landstill & 43 lands etc anything that runs non-basics in it: These were without a doubt the best match ups. Being able to control a landbase such as 43 lands and Landstill is hard at the best of times, but the ability to sit there and watch these decks crumble beneath you is a glorious victory! (Qapla’) One particular fancy I enjoyed was having the [card]Wasteland[/card]/[card]Ghost Quarter[/card] lock down, with a resolved Crucible in play. Albeit sometimes the dredge mechanic did annoy me, the graveyard hate involved brought about devastating results.

Pre-board results varied, however post-board it was pretty simple, I brought in my sideboard, all 15, 80% of the time – I don’t like a lot of loose ends game wise- I feel if I press the advantage it works out in favor for me a majority of the time. Basically this match up was about getting your hate online and getting it fast.

Merfolk: Oh fish how do I hurt thee, when you can be so control oriented? Simple answer? [card]Ghost Quarter[/card] the land out of your deck, destroy it and laugh at you when you have no lands to play. I didn’t actually realize [card]Ghost Quarter[/card]’s true potential until I replayed it with [card]Crucible of Worlds[/card] and my opponent kept going for the basic land. While he was fetching out his land, I was destroying it over and over again. If I was lucky I was able to hit 3 basic lands a turn. This happened many times, being super defensive and protecting your Crucibles is crucial to keeping them locked out. While a resolved [card]Aether Vial[/card] can be a problem, it can be taken care of quickly with your Grips, or [card]Trickbind[/card] it. You don’t want to give them the advantage if you can get the lock and keep attacking their landbase.

Team America: From my understanding they are here to save the expletive day, however today is not that day! Team America was honestly my favorite match up for a few reasons. One- it is just a great deck to play and to play against. You really want to stick to land hating them as much as possible, getting your bombs out fast is a good thing to do, but be careful of their graveyard. Goyf and [card]Tombstalker[/card] can be a hassle to deal with if you aren’t prepared for them. I really suggest a post-board strategy of Sword/Thopter combo to set yourself up life wise and creature wise. Limiting their ability to kill you off quickly gives you a bigger advantage to build your hand to drop down your big creatures, Emmy and [card]Progenitus[/card], which can eat a Goyf and [card]Tombstalker[/card] like a Sunday brunch. You are well on your way to victory, but as I said, be wary of their graveyards as they will manipulate it every chance they can to get their 5/5’s out and in your face.

I’d like to thank KYT again and also Alexander Hayne & Mark Sun for awesome feedback while writing this piece – I hope you guys enjoy this deck! I have loads of fun playing it, and will probably play it for a long time. I may even swap it back to Turboland Hate who knows.

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